rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5228 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 97 of 118 06 May 2015 at 1:23pm | IP Logged |
I updated my first post with more Mandarin resources. I particularly like this one: University Page which has LOTS of links to Chinese resources available on the Internet.
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rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5228 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 98 of 118 11 May 2015 at 11:31am | IP Logged |
OK! Well the 6 week challenge has been very good for me. I've managed to spend 18 hours studying as of this writing (not all of it logged yet) and I'm beginning to be a bit more optimistic about Mandarin. I think a major part of this has been dropping all the "hanzi" study cards from my anki deck. I still have characters in the anki deck, but only the ones which are transcripts of my Pimsleur or the odd proverb I have put in like: 天高皇帝远. But for the most part I've given up on learning X number of characters because they simply weren't sticking in my little brain.
I've now begun to use smallwhites copybook method for tracing over a character for a few times, then writing it a couple more. Basically I have a spreadsheet of characters in greyscale which I print out. I posted a link earlier if you want to grab it off my website and modify it for yourself. This seems to really reinforce the anki deck, and again at the moment I'm only doing the characters from the transcript. The idea is to only look at the ones I'm actually using, and I can expand on them. After I've done the entire set, then I'll either start again with the most common hanzi characters, or possibly the characters from the second Pimsleur set of tapes.
I've been spending a lot of time watching the 成长汉语 Growing Up with Chinese, on CCTV. I've downloaded the transcripts, and the mp4 video files for the first 10 lessons and I'm going to make myself some anki cards from these. It will take a little while, but since I have video, audio, and the transcription in English, Chinese and PinYin it seems the perfect way to learn some stock phrases through rote memorisation.
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smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5300 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish
| Message 99 of 118 20 May 2015 at 12:17pm | IP Logged |
有效 的 東西 不一定 有效率。
有效率 的 東西 不一定 有趣。
有趣 的 東西 又 不一定 有效。
真 令人 頭痛!
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rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5228 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 100 of 118 20 May 2015 at 1:06pm | IP Logged |
有趣 的 東西 又 不一定 有效。是的,但他们是有趣。
:)
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rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5228 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 101 of 118 20 May 2015 at 3:31pm | IP Logged |
Smallwhite unintentionally reminded me I hadn't done an update in my Mandarin log this week. So what have I been doing (other than arguing with people about the effectiveness of word lists?), lots of Pimsluer.
I've also added a lot of "production cards" to my anki deck. I some electronic copies of books in Chinese, so I think I'm just going to take sentences from one of the books, one at a time and add them to the deck as production cards. I think this will be less overwhelming that doing all 3500 common Hanzi cards.
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Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 102 of 118 20 May 2015 at 3:39pm | IP Logged |
If you'd like to study new words or characters (as in, not in your Anki deck), in order of
frequency, from digital texts, perhaps try Imron's "Chinese Text Analyzer?" Last time I
checked it had two weeks of free trial, and worked rather well for me (created a few thousand
flashcards with Hanzi, pronunciation and definition) from seven books nearly instantly, and
all that on a few years old, XP-running PC.
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rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5228 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 103 of 118 20 May 2015 at 3:59pm | IP Logged |
Ezy Ryder wrote:
If you'd like to study new words or characters (as in, not in your Anki deck), in order of
frequency, from digital texts, perhaps try Imron's "Chinese Text Analyzer?" Last time I
checked it had two weeks of free trial, and worked rather well for me (created a few thousand
flashcards with Hanzi, pronunciation and definition) from seven books nearly instantly, and
all that on a few years old, XP-running PC. |
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Cool, I'll check it out. Thanks!
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rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5228 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 104 of 118 25 May 2015 at 12:41pm | IP Logged |
This week I went through some e-books I have in Chinese and I ran some scripts to strip out sentences for my anki deck. I'd done this previously with the book 1984 by Orwell, but this time I wanted to make cloze deletion "production cards" instead of the recognition cards I'd done before. I selected a small book called "3 Cups of Tea" and using my scripts pulled out sentences between 10-20 characters long, and put them on one line per sentence. Uploaded them to Google translate to get a fast, rough translation with PinYin. Then I created my anki cards.
I know Google isn't the most accurate, but I only need a vague idea what the sentence is about because I'm not translating it, I'm typing the character. So the front of the card is the characters with cloze deletion, and the English translation and the back is the pinyin. In case you don't know anything about Mandarin, the pinyin is on the back because you use pinyin to type the character with the keyboard.
I'm been working hard on the 6 week challenge and I've racked up a lot of hours. I managed to get up to a ranking of 5 at one point, but that was quickly overtaken. Starting my commute next week so I'll be restricted to audio, which means A LOT of Pimsleur listening.
I've loaded up another batch of characters and created study books from them. Basically A4 sheets of characters written in grey-scale which I can trace over in order to get used to writing the characters, then a couple of empty blocks to write them without the grey-scale. This helps with recognition, but now I've started to pronounce the character out loud because when they could come up in the anki deck or somewhere else I would recognise them but not remember the sound.
I've been watching a lot of CCTV learning programs and they are very good for me. Becomes a bit repetitive after awhile, but still useful.
Not much else to report, I had thought of starting to write in Mandarin in this log, but I need to get the keyboard working properly.
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